


Muse of the Forgotten: Sayaka, Birth of a Masterpiece

by TaraSamadhi



Series: What Sayaka Left Behind [1]
Category: Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Genre: Divorce, Drama, Drama & Romance, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Haunting, Heartbreak, Inspiration, Memory Related, Music, One-Sided Kamijou Kyousuke/Miki Sayaka, Psychological Drama, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2020-02-07 10:40:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18618982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TaraSamadhi/pseuds/TaraSamadhi
Summary: A few years have passed since Miki Sayaka was taken into the Law of Cycles to join Kaname Madoka, her very existence erased from the memory of anyone she left behind. However, as we see at the end of the series, Kamijou Kyosuke is playing at a concert after she leaves and suddenly says the name "Sayaka", as though a trace of her existence broke off to lodge in the mind of the selfish boy for whom she had foolishly sacrificed everything.Meanwhile, Shizuki Hitomi, who Kyosuke chose over Sayaka, has stayed with Kyosuke in hopes of a normal life together.Kyosuke and Hitomi marry later on, but there is a serious problem that will not go away. Kyosuke has a terrible karmic debt to pay, and he pays it through the composition of an epochal musical masterpiece.





	Muse of the Forgotten: Sayaka, Birth of a Masterpiece

MUSE OF THE FORGOTTEN

I. From Sayaka, the Birth of a Modern Music Classic

Sayaka, the most celebrated musical composition of the 21st century, is a concerto for four strings created by Kamijo Kyosuke, the prodigious Japanese violinist. 

By all accounts, the work was not created because Kamijo desired greatness. Many people who conversed with Kamijo over the years heard the same explanation for the origin of Sayaka. Apparently, from the beginning of his career, Kamijo experienced a growing and finally crippling feeling of guilt and longing that had no cause other than the name “Sayaka”, which rang in his ears night and day. Over the years, he discovered no clue as to who Sayaka might be. Behind closed doors, Kamijo descended into an alcoholic spiral that resulted in his contemplating jumping to his death from twenty stories up, knowing that his unaccountable emotional hell would certainly end when he hit the pavement. Oddly, though, as he looked down, the Sayaka concerto emerged fully formed in his mind and inner ear, crystallizing his longing. Thus was a musical masterpiece born. On one occasion, complimented on the achievement, Kamijo said emphatically that composing it was simply the payment of a debt he hadn't known he had incurred. The rest was out of his hands.

Sayaka took on a life of its own. Detached from its classical music context, it rapidly became a formative structure for jazz and other musical forms. Throughout its various iterations, though, its uncanny emotional power left audiences and musicians in tears or states of bewildered longing. The piece, in this light, is best described as magical. What is more, the intense affect in performance is always accompanied by a compulsion to achieve new and sometimes bizarre musical expression by singers and instrumentalists. The melody and rhythm emerges in a new form with each performance, as the performer is forced, within the song, to bare her or his soul in a universally perceived longing for the lost and forgotten. When lyrics are set to the piece, the name "Sayaka" is chosen with care, since its effect invariably becomes emotionally explosive for the performer and audience. Strangely, no matter how different song adaptations of Sayaka are, if the name is invoked, each song is considered to be the same.

II. A Glimpse of Hitomi

Winter rain, straight from the ocean, pounded down on the streets of Tokyo. Holding a large umbrella, standing in high heels and an expensive business suit, Shizuki Hitomi waited for a cab in one of the city's premier fashion districts, her hair subtly waved and the traditional beauty of her face clearly apparent. Irritated at the failure of a cab to arrive, she closed her eyes to rest them right before the song Sayaka drifted into hearing from a music club three doors away, carrying its usual emotional charge by way of a strange bossanova arrangement.

Her stomach clenched and her eyes watered with the sickening sorrow and anger that the accursed song invoked in her every time she heard it. She hated the name "Sayaka" because the song, and everything it had meant in her life, did not correspond to any woman she could hate or question. That woman had never existed.

"Why did Kyosuke come up with this?" Hitomi muttered the words bitterly, shaking her head. Their marriage had lasted a good ten years. But even as things seemed good, Kyosuke came unwound and drew away from her. The name "Sayaka" appeared on letter paper, sticky refrigerator note paper, and the margins of books. Then, to her horror, Kyosuke started cutting the name Sayaka into the surface of fine furniture and, in the worse incident right before their divorce, burned it into their living room rug. She couldn't protest or help him by that time, because he would flee when he came near her. When the notice of divorce arrived at their house, it had been sent from a Kyoto hotel where, it turned out, Kyosuke had settled for two straight weeks to write his concerto Sayaka.

Entranced by the melody pouring outside from the music club, Hitomi folded up the umbrella and stood fully exposed to the rain. It was falling harder. She wanted to feel it strike every part of her, even the parts it could not touch. "Sayaka," she whispered, "you stole my husband and happiness. I should have known you would. He never loved anyone else."

Blindly, she turned and crossed the street, failing as she always did to check the traffic first.


End file.
